The Maze Unity Project
I’ve written several times in this blog that one of the things I do is teaching game programming. I don’t believe in tests. My approach to learning programming is based on making real games, even if they’re not complex ones, than to make theoretical, unrealistic, never-to-meet exercises of programming. The very first project I ask the students to do is a small game, sometimes in an island sometimes an indoor map, and with some simple 3D puzzles.
Although I’ve been teaching this project for some years now, I’ve never made myself one, so I decided to “make” one version of this project to work as source of ideas and how to implement them. I put the word make between quotation marks because I don’t think what I made is a real game. I’m a terrible level designer (you’ll see if you decide to try the game =P , and that’s one of the reasons why I work with programming), I’m not an artist at all, and I consider this project more of a prototype than a game. But the programming of the game (the topic that I teach) I tried to write as complete, optmized and clear as I could.
There are some simple puzzles and easy to program. Not every interaction has sound and all the assets were download from CC sources (like the Unity Asset Store, and freesound.org). There’s an version that you can try online here. You can also download the complete project here (471 MB of download). I had to change a little the fourth puzzle because the shader that I wrote, to simulate (very simple simulation) a thermal vision like the one shown in the Predator movie, didn’t work in the HTML5 version. I used this post for the shader, and even if the shader could be executed in HTML5, the result is not as elaborate as the original movie and it depends a lot on the colors of the textures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Ga7BKYbs4
In this version the walls of the fourth room start to become invisible after you turn the predator vision on. If you download and play the stand alone version, you’ll see the effect the way I programmed the first time.
All the code can be download from my github account the complete project can be download here. The HTML5 version can be played here. The controls for the game is a classical FPS keys (AWSD for movement and SHIFT to run, you can’t shoot in this game). Again, it’s just a prototype not a game itself, but enjoy.
Two things before ending this post, the name of the project is inspired by one of the most intriguing features of the first season of HBO series, WestWorld, The Maze.
If you played the first Deus Ex game, you will probably recognize the ingame soundtrack. It’s a variation of the Unatco track from the original game, composed by EndeShard for one of the best mods of the orignal Deus Ex called Revision. Go play this mod if you liked the original game.
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